By David Tuller, DrPH
Last Tuesday and Wednesday (December 12th and 13th), the US National Institutes of Health–and, specifically, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases–held a two-day meeting called “Advancing ME/CFS Research: Identifying Targets for Intervention and Learning from Long COVID.” In 2019, I’d physically attended a similar NIH gathering; this time, I caught many of the presentations online instead. Jaime Seltzer, MEAction’s scientific director, was there in person. In an interview last Friday, she shared some of her impressions of the event.
Amazing to hear some info coming out of the conference. I know it was available for the remote watching online but I was too sick to access any of it, I was hoping people would talk a bit about what they heard there. Thanks for this. Very interesting.
Very informative.
I’ve been doing some work on software analysis of proteins arranged by ribosomes. These statements I came across may have some bearing on the issues in ‘Long Covid’, ‘Short Covid’, and ‘ME/CFS’ research:
“The human body consists of tens of thousands of proteins. What’s more, these occur in several variants whose concentration in the organism can change over time. Matthias Mann from the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Martinsried therefore needs clever algorithms and a lot of computing power for his research. His goal, after all, is to decode the entire human proteome – that is, the full set of proteins in the human body – for the benefit of medical science.”
“Proteome: It is now estimated that the human body contains between 80,000 and 400,000 proteins. However, they aren’t all produced by all the body’s cells at any given time. Cells have different proteomes depending on their cell type. There are thus at least 250 different proteomes corresponding to the 250 cell types in the human body. The proteome depends on many factors. For example, different proteins may be produced depending on an organism’s age, diet and state of health. The protein composition is also affected by environmental influences such as medications and pollutants.”
(https://www.mpg.de/11447687/W003_Biology_medicine_054-059.pdf). That final sentence “THE PROTEIN COMPOSITION IS ALSO AFFECTED BY ENVIRONMENTAL INFLUENCES SUCH AS MEDICATIONS AND POLLUTANTS” sends the hypotheses to the stars, eh?
Just sayin’ …
Thank you David and Jaime
Rivka